The Collapsing Narrative
Posted by Andrew | Filed under A Farewell to Authority, Breakfast in the Ruins, Commentary, Environment, General, Gripes, Humour, The Destruction of History
A sign of our times is the constant harping on by the legacy media about things which are not really happening, and these are simply distractions.
The bizarre public conversation regarding apparently rising levels of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere is a Will o’the Wisp, a phantasm. Common sense would suggest the opposite over geological time scales – that the combination of weathering and biological processes, which (as far as we know) are absent on other rocky planets, will eventually sequester all of the atmospheric carbon, at which point, plant growth will cease, and we will all starve to death.
If you pushed me, I would have to admit that there is so much Clown World activity these days that I often just sit back and laugh. This “climate science” farce, in which it is claimed that Armageddon is only years away, primarily due to the combination of burning fossil fuels and cow farts, clearly not only doesn’t coincide with observable facts, but is also hiding something that nobody ever seems to talk about. Now, it does seem strange to me that prestigious researchers don’t mention this, but it also shows that maybe well-educated and experienced people who should know better also don’t see it, even though it is right under their noses, and we might describe it as being part of “Chemistry 101”. Or maybe people are afraid to state the glaringly obvious?
What I am talking about here is the tendency of chemical reactions to proceed until they are no longer thermodynamically possible. Admittedly, this is somewhat difficult to illustrate and may seem somewhat obscure to many onlookers, but bear with me; this is real science, not journalistic gobbledegook. Remember: this is an experienced and world-published chemist and biochemistry graduate talking here, not the kind of “scientist” bemoaned by Thomas S. Kuhn back in 1962 (the year that I was born!) who spends his or her whole damned career trying to “verify” the theories of others rather than challenging them. Question everything.
Back to the chemistry…
Another thing we have to remember is that, for precisely this reason, Earth’s current conditions are nowhere near resembling what they were like when this planet was first formed. As we are talking primarily about the atmosphere and climate here, we should remember that, according to data from geological sciences, the atmosphere of this planet was originally unbreathable; it was toxic and contained components such as methane, ammonia and hydrogen sulphide, and it remained this way for millions of years because the dominant early lifeforms of the time – bacteria and their allies – produced these as the wastes from their respiratory processes.
All of that started to change when photosynthesis arrived, and a new waste – oxygen – started to be produced in vast quantities. The result of this was that the former kings of this domain – anaerobic bacteria – could not survive with oxygen diffusing into the waters, and they were forced to survive in places occupying the lowest positions in the oxygen gradient. Think of the dark, anoxic substrata of estuarine mud flats (and I know, because I went there sampling anaerobes when I was a biology student), and you will get the idea.
A big part of our current situation, then, is apparently due to an accident of nature – a transition from purely anaerobic chemical life processes to aerobic ones in geologically ancient and remote times, and resulting from the appearance of photosynthesis and the subsequent change of major atmospheric constituents from gaseous wastes such as methane, ammonia and hydrogen sulphide to gaseous oxygen, which is factually toxic to the surviving anaerobes.
We could illustrate this by referring to other rocky bodies in the Solar System to see how it might have been otherwise. On the one hand, we have Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, a frigid world with a thick, orange atmosphere composed largely of nitrogen and methane; on the other, we have a place like Mars, where the atmosphere is composed mainly of carbon dioxide, plus a few odd little components (such as methane). We are sometimes told in the popular scientific press that the former represents a primordial Earth, and from our discussion above, this seems to be true; from it we could conclude that the big difference is that the emergence of life made it more chemically dynamic. The same could be said of Mars: perhaps, if there were photosynthetic life there, the atmosphere would be strikingly different – much more like that of Earth is nowadays. It would still be quite thin, however, because of the relatively low gravity of Mars (compared with that of Earth, for example) – a factor overcome to some extent, in the case of Titan, by the frigid temperatures.
What I would suggest here is that the presence of life on Earth, and the dynamism it contributes to geological and atmospheric processes, has an additional effect: it slowly leads to the depletion of carbon dioxide by sequestering into other forms. For example, as carbon dioxide is soluble in water (a polar liquid in which it forms soluble carbonate anions, which can form solids with e.g. dissolved metal ions such as calcium, magnesium and copper), which is perhaps its most important characteristic from a purely chemical point of view, it is more immediately able to undergo reactions which can convert it into inaccessible forms; think of corals, for example. We won’t go into a discussion of the enzymes involved here, but simply remind ourselves that stony corals are “stony” because their polyps take carbon dioxide from the air (dissolved in seawater) and convert it into an insoluble carbonate. Some of this may return to the atmosphere when the polyps die and their calcareous skeletons begin to degrade, but if these are subsequently buried, the degradation would be prevented and eventually, the skeletons would become fossils in a rocky matrix, at least if the conventional process of fossilisation is correct. Since the primary source of carbonate for corals comes in the form of carbon dioxide dissolved in sea water, the long-term result of this would be the depletion of atmospheric CO2.
We might also remember that the shells of molluscs and many marine algae, both geologically ancient and modern, are likewise composed of calcium carbonate (aragonite), sequestered biologically and presumably only slowly weathered away when their owner dies. Again, there are plenty of fossils of these creatures and again, once encased in a rocky matrix, the material is sequestered and chemically inaccessible. Think of the huge deposits of ancient microscopic marine algae such as we find on the south coast of England – and how many such deposits are not exposed to weathering due to still being buried deep under subsequent rock strata. They might not even go this far – if buried in mud, perhaps no further reactions are possible with these materials (concrete, anyone?).
An additional material for sequestering could be wood. Non-woody plants fix carbon into sugars via glycolate (mainly), and the plants may then transform it into sugars or oils. The sugars are partly stored and partly used for structural purposes – polymerised into amylose (starch) for future energy usage, or further polymerised into cellulose to create wood fibres. There would be an annual carbon dioxide flux according to how many non-woody plants die and decay, but less so in the case of woody plants, especially in the case of large trees in (for example) Earth’s extensive boreal and antiboreal forests. The boreal forests might be interesting here on account of their evergreen content – resinous pine needles again sequester carbon and rot away very slowly, unlike the leaves of deciduous trees. You do not see processes like these on Titan or Mars (or even on Venus).
Venus is interesting because it has an atmosphere composed mainly of carbon dioxide [1] plus a lesser amount of nitrogen and sulphuric acid; it is also much denser than the atmospheres of the other rocky bodies. Is Venus so hot because of the carbon dioxide? Perhaps the truth is that Venus is a relatively recently-formed planet (according to thousands of stories in global folklore; check out the works of Immanuel Velikovsky for more information), and what we are seeing is the remanent heat of its formation, which probably is being lost only slowly because of its closer proximity to the sun.
Our main point, however, even in the case of Venus, is that the one thing not present is life; the atmospheres of these other rocky bodies, according to conventional wisdom, represent possible primordial states from which our current atmosphere could have developed – if life were present. Left alone, the existing geological and atmospheric processes there would presumably stay the same, forever. On Earth, however, the geological/geochemical record, as it is currently understood, seems to indicate three basic phases: the initial, lifeless and anoxic, primitive post-formation atmosphere; a second phase, resulting from chemical life processes, and still anoxic and too toxic for modern-day life; and finally the almost-end stage which we have today, caused by plant photosynthesis and the global availability of oxygen, which is itself toxic for surviving anaerobes. However, if our hypothesis here of time-dependent CO2 depletion is correct (and it should be because it is thermodynamic at its heart), we are living in the end stages of survivability on this planet not because of pollution, but simply because the chemistry of carbon dioxide allows it to dissolve easily in water, which is where it becomes available to biological processes, either within the watery photosynthetic tissues of plants, or by being absorbable into animal tissues, where enzymes can transform it into a solid.
Our eventual fate, then, is starvation, as the levels of available carbon dioxide in the atmosphere decline past the point at which plant life can convert it into sugars and oils. If it falls to half its current level, plant life will start to die, and as animals depend upon plants to maintain the food chains, they also will become extinct – including ourselves. The end-point of Earth’s development is starvation of its inhabitants due to the irreversible mass sequestration of the original atmospheric carbon dioxide. We should note that during periods when the CO2 levels rise, plant life flourishes; we should also remember that when growers of crops, using greenhouses, want to enhance growth, they add CO2 to the closed atmosphere in which they grow the plants. You can visualise current CO2 levels compared to those of the geological past in the graphic, “We are in a CO2 famine”, in a previous entry here.
What stimulated me into writing all of this (and it took a few days of cogitation for it to all crystallise in my mind) was an article at ZeroHedge by our friend, “Tyler Durden” [2]. According to an article in The Washington Post (inaccessible to we plebs due to their paywall, but reported on X as well), the corrected geological record for the past 500 million years shows unequivocally that mean global temperatures are in steep decline and have been for the last 50 million years. Essentially, temperature measurements have been compromised for a long time by the change of local temperatures resulting from increasing urbanisation, so that formerly isolated measurement stations (which used to be in the countryside) show incorrect temperatures resulting from being caught up in the heat bubbles surrounding cities:
“WaPo journalists cited a new study about Earth’s global surface temperatures over the last 485 million years. In 2023, Earth’s average temperature reached 58.96 F (14.98 C), well below the average 96.8 degrees F (36 degrees Celsius) the study showed around 100 million years ago. The trend shows Earth’s temperatures have been sliding for 50 million years. ” [2]
The interesting thing about this is that, if CO2 is an effective “greenhouse gas” (and it is often said that water vapour is more effective, not least because the cloud cover on Earth represents a self-correcting system; ditto for methane), it would actually make sense that mean global temperatures should decline in tandem with declining CO2. However, we might then have to ask a question like: “… but the atmosphere of Mars is almost entirely made up of carbon dioxide, and it’s freezing there!”, and according to authorities such as NASA [3], a good day on Mars would be barely temperate; nights there would put Antarctica to shame. Clearly, the whole “Global Warming” hypothesis is unsupported by any available evidence.
Personally, as I suggested earlier, I tend to find all of this amusing, but it is for precisely this kind of reason that I also gave up on a career in science long ago; I even left the UK and changed careers because after graduating, it proved impossible to get a post in my chosen area of study, and you can’t live on air and promises. Essentially, however, there seems to be no evidence whatsoever that establishes a causative link between increasing CO2 levels in Earth’s air and rising atmospheric temperatures; what evidence there is indicates that it has been declining over geological time, and that on the same timescale, global atmospheric temperatures have likewise been falling, and that this decline continues despite widespread deforestation and the burning of fossil fuels which are alleged to have the opposite effect. Whole spurious areas of pseudoscience and lucrative careers have been built upon this foundation of sand.
Remember, folks: all of this is just gaslighting and it isn’t really happening. Nothing in the foregoing discussion needed any great leaps of logic or mathematical analysis; all of that has already been performed at various locations in academia. We have merely linked together a few salient points, most of which were apparently produced by that same collective academia long ago.
A final caveat is as follows: we only know what we can see right now. We can’t jump into a time machine, like Doctor Who’s TARDIS, and go on a jolly romp through time seeing exactly what happened in the remote past. Our experience of time is purely one-dimensional: we have no idea how this planet formed, how many planets there were originally in total, what happened to them or even how they were arranged around the sun; take the Electric Universe theory seriously (and indeed, I do), and the first thing you realise is that we don’t even know whether the planets that we see today even belong to this one sun, or whether they wandered or were snatched in from elsewhere; the surprising heterogeneity of the visible planets is very suggestive of this. If the EU adherents’ accounts (based upon legends and traditional stories handed down from those who were there) are anything to go by, both our primary (sun) and the arrangement of the original planets were probably very different. We have to tread carefully because we are at the end of a long set of processes, plus we have to be careful when we try to apply analogies from our observation, as the analogies may be incorrect.
Real science is a pursuit in which a hypothesis must be falsifiable in order to be supported, at least until it is either fully or partially disproven by new research or evidence; everything in science is therefore purely provisional. Only a nitwit politician can stand up and assert without evidence that “the science is settled”. Science is never settled; it’s a cat on a hot tin roof, and a healthy science is one in which different hypotheses compete to see which one(s) better represent(s) reality. When only one hypothesis is presented and, as so often in this particular case, others are deliberately excluded from public discussion or subjected to public ridicule, you know that somebody is up to no good. Two or more options are healthy competition; a single option is propaganda.
References:
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Venus : “Venus’s atmosphere is composed of 96.5% carbon dioxide and 3.5% nitrogen, with other chemical compounds present only in trace amounts.[1] It is much denser and hotter than that of Earth; the temperature at the surface is 740 K (467 °C, 872 °F), and the pressure is 93 bar (1,350 psi), roughly the pressure found 900 m (3,000 ft) under water on Earth. The atmosphere of Venus supports decks of opaque clouds of sulfuric acid that cover the entire planet, preventing optical Earth-based and orbital observation of the surface.”
[3] https://science.nasa.gov/mars/facts/ : “The temperature on Mars can be as high as 70 degrees Fahrenheit (20 degrees Celsius) or as low as about -225 degrees Fahrenheit (-153 degrees Celsius). And because the atmosphere is so thin, heat from the Sun easily escapes this planet. If you were to stand on the surface of Mars on the equator at noon, it would feel like spring at your feet (75 degrees Fahrenheit or 24 degrees Celsius) and winter at your head (32 degrees Fahrenheit or 0 degrees Celsius).”
Tags: chemistry, farce, gaslighting, geochemistry, global warming
The Few Real Goods: Treasures of the Ages
Posted by Andrew | Filed under A Farewell to Authority, Art, Breakfast in the Ruins, Commentary, General, Lost Geographies, Retrovision, The Destruction of History, Uncategorized
What follows arose from a morning reflection upon Ryan Holiday’s “The Stoic Journal” and “The Daily Stoic” for April 20th.
It has been difficult for me to return to the habit of writing, as my life in Korea has been rather chaotic over the last few years, but enforcing upon myself the semi-habit of writing a daily Stoic journal has, partly at least, rekindled the desire and pointed to the need, for the writer, of suitable “prompts”, which is the essential purpose of Ryan’s Journal: Pose a question to the reader, who then writes a response.
In truth, of course, some questions are difficult to answer in the moment, and sufficient perspective to frame a reasonable response may actually follow much later, in my experience, when something unexpected happens in your life and the idea suddenly crystallises into clarity in your mind. This happened to me again today.
One question which the Stoics dealt with was the real worth of things, bearing in mind that they were mortals, having a finite lifespan, living in times when death was a commonplace phenomenon, seen daily on the streets, at home and of course, for the Roman citizen, on many battlefields during the lifetime of a single individual. Therefore, given the desire of the ordinary mortal to acquire as much wealth as possible during one lifetime, the question arose as to whether increasing one’s personal fortune was an automatic guarantee of happiness, and the answer seemed to be a negative one.
This was not meant to be a remorseless statement of fact in the face of the inevitable; after all, what the Stoics were seeking was a more joyful and at the same time virtuous life. They simply observed that increasing wealth did not guarantee a life that was happier or more virtuous, and since financial wealth in those days was a material thing (precious metals, property), it was something that you could not take with you when you died (I need hardly point out that, having come close to mortality myself a couple of times in recent years, my mind often dwells on these things nowadays…). Many of them did indeed achieve (or inherit) sufficient wealth to understand that it could be a less-than-perfect experience, so they were in a good position to comment.
Noting that Ryan names wisdom, self-control, justice and courage as “virtues” (quoting from Marcus Aurelius) and that people will work hard all their lives to achieve it, and also that though desirable, “wealth” itself is not a “virtue”, one has to ask two questions:
1: If the acquisition of wealth is not a “virtue”, then what kind of “wealth” could be considered a “virtue”? What have past commentators had to say about this?
2: If wealth can be acquired by a life of hard work, what, then, is required to acquire wisdom, self-control, justice and courage? What kind of “work” or “study” is required to obtain these things?
Marcus Aurelius named these four latter as “things that are unquestionably good” – in other words, things which are undoubtedly beneficial to obtain. Financial “wealth” can be seen as being a more dubious “benefit” because it does not automatically guarantee happiness – it is, perhaps, a liability because those who do not have it always want to take it from you – including, of course, governments. However, in the civilisations that we have had, the value of money (which is more nominal or virtual than real nowadays) allows us to obtain at least the necessities that we need on a daily basis, such as food, clothing and utilities; a necessary evil, perhaps, but a useful means of value exchange.
Maybe we should take Marcus himself as an example. His times were very different from ours: he knew well that he was mortal (in his position, he probably had someone whispering “Memento mori!” in his ear several times each day) and understood better than anyone that he couldn’t take the wealth of the Roman Emperor with him when he passed on. In Marcus’s case, the inheritance that he bequeathed to posterity (in other words, ourselves) was not the gold and silver of Rome, but the philosophical wealth of his “Meditations”; the physical riches of Rome have been lost to time, but the wealth of Marcus’s (and other individuals’) thinking was preserved, and there is a lesson in this.
Realising, as I did today when I sat at my desk for the morning meditation, that the whole question related to the transitory nature of life and that material wealth (such as accumulated financial savings and other property) is therefore only a temporary pleasure at best, I was reminded of some hymns that we used to sing during morning assemblies at school in Leicester; in particular, I recalled a children’s song about natural treasures – experiential pleasures which we can only appreciate precisely because we are alive.
Therein lies the point that we are making here, which was the point that Ryan was trying to make: material wealth can only be enjoyed or appreciated while we live; hence, since we are mortal, material wealth is as fleeting and temporary as other living things, which have short lives and pass before us each year, according to the seasons.
I had some difficulty finding copies of that particular hymn, but what follows is taken from a *.jpg picture [1] and a simple PowerPoint file which you can download [2] (see “References” below). This was “Daisies Are Our Silver” by the English writer Jan Struther (Joyce Maxtone Graham, Joyce Placzek) [3], and I quote it here in full:
Daisies Are Our Silver [4]
Daisies are our silver,
Buttercups our gold:
This is all the treasure
We can have or hold.
Raindrops are our diamonds
And the morning dew;
While for shining sapphires
We’ve the speedwell blue. [3]
These shall be our emeralds,
Leaves so new and green;
Roses make the reddest
Rubies ever seen.
God, who gave these treasures
To your children small,
Teach us how to love them
And grow like them all.
Make us bright as silver,
Make us good as gold;
Warm as summer roses
Let our hearts unfold.
Gay as leaves in April,
Clear as drops of dew –
God, who made the speedwell,
Keep us true to you.
Though intended for children rather than adults, this has always been one of the most powerful memento mori that I have ever known – powerful enough for me to remember throughout my whole life. I will return to the works of Struther again in the future.
This is, however, one of so many cultural reminders that the works we undertake during our lifetimes are the things by which we are remembered: and that the achievement of wisdom, self-control, justice and courage originate in our Socratic reflection upon our own lives and experiences, putting them into perspective, adding them to our existing experiential schemata and, perhaps, using that knowledge to create things that naturally outlast our own existence. This work, this study in search of the virtuous, is lifelong, and it only ends when we end.
It is not without reason that we are able to wonder at the great works of the past – pyramids, bridges, ancient Roman and Greek buildings, paintings and sculptures, and of course, Homer and Shakespeare. Our bodies are only temporary shells which we inhabit, by means of which these things are realised and become part of the public inheritance: the treasures of the ages.
References
[1] https://www.pinterest.com/pin/83879611794491343/
[2] https://www.slideserve.com/yli/daisies-are-our-silver-buttercups-our-gold-this-is-all-the-treasure-we-can-have-or-hold-powerpoint-ppt-presentation
[3] Speedwell: Or Veronica, perennial flowering plants with small blue flowers, e.g. Veronica spicata; see https://www.woodlands.co.uk/blog/woodland-flowers/blue-flowers/speedwells/
[4] There is a collection of Struther’s works available to read at https://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/struther/struther.html
The CO2 famine
Posted by Andrew | Filed under A Farewell to Authority, Breakfast in the Ruins, Commentary, Environment, General, Gripes, The Destruction of History, Uncategorized
It’s quite incredible that, despite the use of different chemical proxies to determine the carbon dioxide in past eras which demonstrate that over vast amounts of time, atmospheric CO2 was vastly higher than it is now, there are people that insist that we need to not release it into the air.
Increasing the carbon dioxide in the air allows plant life to flourish; that’s why growers add it to the air in their greenhouses – with other conditions normal, higher carbon dioxide allows the deposition of more biomass.
However, this graphic suggests that we are in danger precisely because we listen to Chicken Little so much. Those California Redwoods weren’t made in a day, and they needed carbon dioxide. Maybe that’s why they took so long to grow!!!
I just saw this on Twitter… read it and weep:
Towards the Alternative Tech Life (I)
Posted by Andrew | Filed under A Farewell to Authority, Commentary, Computing, Environment, General, Health, The Destruction of History, Uncategorized
As regular readers may know, I have been trying (not altogether successfully, alas) to escape the demesne of the evil Bill G. and his hangers-on ever since leaving benighted Blighty. The most interesting aspect of this, right now, adventures with Linux aside, is what is happening to both what have come to be referred to as the “legacy media” and, indeed, to YouTube itself. Recent events and the behaviour of YT themselves have started to make it crystal clear what is happening, at the same time fuelling the rise of alternative media. It would all be so amusing if it were not so serious.
One thing which has emerged on the Internet since way-back-when is the desire of individuals to upload all kinds of goofy shit to the Internet. Originally there were few suitable outlets, so when YT came along, people naturally thought that this was an ideal place for their video material, and gradually said material became longer in duration and more intense (although not necessarily more “serious”) in terms of content. In recent years, however, we have been seeing that these outlets are in fact a form of social control, and the more serious (and relevant) content producers have been sidelined, banned and forced to resort to alternative means to get their message out. All I can say is that this is a very good trend, as YT itself seeks to become ever more irrelevant and to imitate the failing model of legacy media, which fewer and fewer seem to want to subscribe to because it no longer has content (or viewpoints) which relate to theirs.
Now I have subscribed to a lot of these alternative platforms over the last few years for one reason or another, the main reason being that, for whatever reason they may have, the legacy media are conspicuously controlled by a group (or groups) who clearly do not have the well-being of the various nations at heart: someone’s agenda is being played out and the media are suspiciously compliant and supportive of that agenda.
There have been many recent cases where serious incidents have occurred and the mainstream (“lamestream”) media have not reported them at all; it’s like an ongoing malaise which affects everyone, but especially the brain-dead normie types for whom media always report the truth and cannot be questioned. As an example, large-scale food repositories across the US have been (and continue to be) subject to sudden acts of what appear to be arson – suddenly and inexplicably catching fire, therefore depriving whole local populations downstream of food supplies.
The latest incarnation of this has been an outbreak of train crashes. You may perhaps have heard of the recent vinyl chloride shipment crashing in Ohio and the decision of the local authorities to actually set light to the shipment, ostensibly to prevent the containers from exploding, but little is being said about the disastrous effects of this not only to the locals and their wildlife and water courses, but also the eastward progression of the polluted air towards the Atlantic. Joker has recently put a video out about this and you should watch it:
While it remains the case that there is a lot of fine material still available on YT, it is increasingly a place where anyone who has a message in conflict with their policies can be demonetised and even de-platformed, for reasons which are often arbitrary and unavailable for public scrutiny; science there is often a domain dominated by virtue signallers who are merely acting as propagandists for some official paradigm, and who essentially present as brain-dead repeaters.
Against this backdrop, a whole range of new platforms have arisen to which creators on YT have increasingly been taking resort as it has become less possible to air their material and views there. I thoroughly recommend you to get away from YT and find out where so many well-established creators have set themselves up. You will not be disappointed!
The Disaster of November 5th
Posted by Andrew | Filed under A Farewell to Authority, Breakfast in the Ruins, General, Gripes, Humour, Lost Geographies, Odds and Ends..., The Destruction of History, Uncategorized
Ah, November 5th… the day some of us recall the failure of G. Fawkes et al. to blow up the old Houses of Parliament with the King inside – discovered, according to legend, as he was literally about to light the taper on the charge.
The irony, of course, being that a couple of centuries later, they burned down almost of their own accord (having been built from wood)… the Office Keeper and Yeoman Usher of the Receipt of the Exchequer, who had held that position for some time, was one William Godwin, dissenter and anarchist. His responsibilities* included the sweeping of the chimneys at the Palace of Westminster, and this little disaster came one night during his tenure.
After the flames had died down, a contest was held for the design of the new buildings, the ones we see today. I read elsewhere (many years ago) that it happened because he was asleep on the job (as he was granted rooms on site).
Alas, poor Guy… but the bonfires and fireworks were good. 
* See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Godwin, “Later years and death”: “Literary critic Marilyn Butler concluded her review of a 1980 biography of Godwin by comparing him favourably to Guy Fawkes: Godwin was more successful in his opposition to the status quo.”
More Wisdom from the Late Mr. McKenna
Posted by Andrew | Filed under A Farewell to Authority, Breakfast in the Ruins, Commentary, General, Lost Geographies, The Destruction of History, Uncategorized
Always interesting to hear from the late Mr. M. … shame he’s not with us any more!Brought to you by YouTube via our dear friend, Mr. D. Icke (for it was he).
Bang on the Button
Posted by Andrew | Filed under A Farewell to Authority, Breakfast in the Ruins, General, Lost Geographies, The Destruction of History
Came across this on FB randomly this evening, and I agree with him all the way… so I’m sharing it here, too:
Max is saying precisely what I am trying to adumbrate in these pages.
The Field of Beans and the Limits of Perception
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Breakfast in the Ruins, Lost Geographies, The Destruction of History
Aaarrgghhh… who forgot to turn off the cell phone alarm for weekdays? On holiday this week, and no need to get out of bed at 6:00 a.m. on Korean Children’s Day… when will I learn???
Slouching into the big room in my new apartment – the one with the computer and the books and other shit all over the floor because I need to buy some new furniture (to replace all the mouldy stuff I left behind in Daegu) – as I checked the mails and messages from the previous night, up popped a link at the “Lunar Barbecue” group page (thank you to Pedro Ribeiro for that) to the following YT vid about Terence McKenna called “Aliens and Archetypes” (from the “Thinking Allowed” TV series, dated 1990)… but what follows is really only tangential to his topic and a brief statement of a thought or two, being the result merely of my reaction to one of his remarks therein.
It has to be admitted that Mr. McKenna always had something very interesting to say about so many things, and whilst I was watching this I caught his brief remarks about communication within and with nature, which made me think: how is it that we ceased being able to do so? Could it be that what we have laughingly called “education” for so long is actually the inculcation of prejudices which make such communication (or even the sensibility thereof) impossible, simply by denying the possibility of such things, and therefore dulling our possible perception of them?
There have been, over the last few years, and especially recently, a flurry of items about how plants communicate via both the air and the soil coming through from various sources; this seems to be an active area of research. It makes me wonder what people will end up eating in the future, as it slowly dawns on everyone that plants are demonstrably sentient, like animals. Some say that eating meat is murder (although some of us just call it “food”), so what does that make eating fruits (often the reproductive organs of plants) and vegetables (their flowers or other storage organs)?
Of course, we would then go on to put on our biologist’s hat (well, I would, at any rate) and ask: “Well, if raising meat in broiler houses and the like is considered bad because it turns animals into products in an unnatural environment and is inhumane, then what are we to make of (say) a broad field of wheat, or a rice padi?” – if battery farms are unethical, then what can we say about a field of beans?
For a long time, I have been thinking that each grain of wheat or rice, each bean in the pod, is a life which has the potential to grow; its nutritional value lies precisely in the fact that it is one of the plant’s reproductive structures, in which energy and nutrients have been invested for the future survival of the species, just the same as (for example) a hen’s egg. The difference, however, is that parthenogenesis in a hen’s egg is a relatively rare event (although it does happen sometimes) and hence is rarely encountered in an egg cup or frying pan because, of course, there is no requirement to fertilise the egg before it becomes useful; its nutrient value for the human consumer would be wasted if the egg started to develop into a chick before delivery [1]. In the case of plant seeds, these would not exist without fertilisation, so we have a situation in which – unlike tubers, roots or even hens’ eggs – it is actually necessary to engender new life in order to reap the nutritional benefits of the plants’ labours, a fact to which we turn an eternally and conveniently blind eye.
Perhaps the tragedy of human existence – in the correct and original meaning and intention of the Greek term tragoidea (“goat song”, of a great person brought low by fate) is that humanity has become thoroughly enmeshed in a lifestyle where it exists purely as a result of squandering both itself and the world which supports it; yet being conscious of the full truth of its existence would cause impossible levels of angst at the thought of eating anything, and so its senses have to be dulled in order to make that existence bearable. Thus, it slowly destroys everything, including itself. It is doubly tragic that this exists alongside a patently untruthful inculcation about the past of humanity, which is used to keep us in a psychotic state and which allows us to be controlled more easily.
However, there are times when we need to be reminded of these things, even if only in passing, as here with the much-missed Mr. McKenna, as well as, perhaps, a nod to Aristotle in being able to express our psychological maturity by considering topics which we might otherwise find unpalatable [2], and perhaps, also, to reflect upon what level of difficulty we might have in actually communicating with aliens when our minds have already been so prejudiced against it on our own world. We have at least been fortunate to have occasional bright lights like Terence McKenna to illuminate our darkness with flashes of insight.
Notes:
[1] Unless you like to eat a balut, of course: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balut_(food)
[2] “It is the mark of an educated mind to entertain a thought without accepting it.”: see https://i.pinimg.com/originals/48/f1/5f/48f15ff7949996f4e65454b4b129fa29.jpg
An End to Civilisation
Posted by Andrew | Filed under A Farewell to Authority, Breakfast in the Ruins, Commentary, General, The Destruction of History
One would like to think that one were a “civilised” person, in terms of its connotations of sensibility and behaviour, but the term becomes unacceptable under the simplest analysis. Which other term could be used more accurately?
This time, I want to broach a theme which I have been mulling over and digesting for a long time, and the use of which – on reflection – perfectly encapsulates the psychological prison from which we have been unwilling to free ourselves. Yet that act of liberation – when it arrives – needs to be a psychological one, and not a physical one; it is a transition from one state of perception to another, a change of viewpoint. Physical liberation cannot come before psychological liberation.
Recently, I have been watching the videos (and listening to the podcasts) of Mark Passio on YouTube. Mark’s focus is upon the occult nature of much of what surrounds us in everyday life, as well as pointing out the common misconception among “lay” people (meaning, in this particular case, people who are not themselves occult practitioners) that the term “occult” itself necessarily equates with “evil”. As he points out, there is no actual connotation of anything in this term beyond its original meaning, which is merely “hidden” or “obscured”, and that many things in daily life are “occulted”, for example (my input here) the results of scientific research, which are usually sequestered behind a paywall erected by publishers. However, Mark’s real focus is with actual practitioners of the dark arts, whom he distinguishes from beneficial practitioners by referring to them as “dark” and “light”. He goes into some depth examining the psychology and motivations of the “dark” practitioners, having been for some ten years, and by his own admission, one of the “dark” ones himself, although, he admits, at a relatively low level.
Part of Mark’s exposition is that the modern practitioners of these dark occult activities are the descendants of others whose blood-line goes back thousands of years, that their own focus is primarily psychology, and in particular psychological methods of controlling large numbers of people to do the practitioners’ bidding; it is thus that such practitioners can attain and maintain positions of relative power, and hence profit and have a better lifestyle for prolonged historical periods despite themselves being relatively few in number. However, the result seems to be that they themselves have become demonstrably psychotic.
You can see almost four hours of his lecture on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odw6q4fcORE
Likewise, when one reads the novels of Carlos Castañeda, his teacher, Don Juan Matus, who was supposed to be a modern-day nagual or Mexican shaman (sorcerer), asserts that the true controllers of our lives achieved their aims by simply inculcating their own psychotic mindset in the general populace. After that, of course, people became easy to control by simply putting the appropriate ideas into their heads and diverting their attention. Let me here quote (at length, for clarity) the appropriate passage from Castaneda’s “The Active Side of Infinity”:
“This is the appropriate time of day for doing what I am asking you to do,” he said. “It takes a moment to engage the necessary attention in you to do it. Don’t stop until you catch that fleeting black shadow.”
I did see some strange fleeting black shadow projected on the foliage of the trees. It was either one shadow going back and forth or various fleeting shadows moving from left to right or right to left or straight up in the air. They looked like fat black fish to me, enormous fish. It was as if gigantic swordfish were flying in the air. I was engrossed in the sight. Then, finally, it scared me. It became too dark to see the foliage, yet I could still see the fleeting black shadows.
“What is it, don Juan?” I asked. “I see fleeting black shadows all over the place.”
“Ah, that’s the universe at large,” he said, “incommensurable, nonlinear, outside the realm of syntax. The sorcerers of ancient Mexico were the first ones to see those fleeting shadows, so they followed them around. They saw them as you’re seeing them, and they saw them as energy that flows in the universe. And they did discover something transcendental.”
He stopped talking and looked at me. His pauses were perfectly placed. He always stopped talking when I was hanging by a thread.
“What did they discover, don Juan?” I asked.
“They discovered that we have a companion for life,” he said, as clearly as he could. “We have a predator that came from the depths of the cosmos and took over the rule of our lives. Human beings are its prisoners. The predator is our lord and master. It has rendered us docile, helpless. If we want to protest, it suppresses our protest. If we want to act independently, it demands that we don’t do so.”
It was very dark around us, and that seemed to curtail any expression on my part. If it had been daylight, I would have laughed my head off. In the dark, I felt quite inhibited.
“It’s pitch black around us,” don Juan said, “but if you look out of the corner of your eye, you will still see fleeting shadows jumping all around you.”
He was right. I could still see them. Their movement made me dizzy. Don Juan turned on the light, and that seemed to dissipate everything.
“You have arrived, by your effort alone, to what the shamans of ancient Mexico called the topic of topics,” don Juan said. “I have been beating around the bush all this time, insinuating to you that something is holding us prisoner. Indeed we are held prisoner! This was an energetic fact for the sorcerers of ancient Mexico.”
“Why has this predator taken over in the fashion that you’re describing, don Juan?” I asked. “There must be a logical explanation.”
“There is an explanation,” don Juan replied, “which is the simplest explanation in the world. They took over because we are food for them, and they squeeze us mercilessly because we are their sustenance. Just as we rear chickens in chicken coops, gallineros, the predators rear us in human coops, humaneros. Therefore, their food is always available to them.”
I felt that my head was shaking violently from side to side. I could not express my profound sense of unease and discontentment, but my body moved to bring it to the surface. I shook from head to toe without any volition on my part.
“No, no, no, no,” I heard myself saying. “This is absurd, don Juan. What you’re saying is something monstrous. It simply can’t be true, for sorcerers or for average men, or for anyone.”
“Why not?” don Juan asked calmly. “Why not? Because it infuriates you?”
“Yes, it infuriates me,” I retorted. “Those claims are monstrous!”
“Well,” he said, “you haven’t heard all the claims yet. Wait a bit longer and see how you feel. I’m going to subject you to a blitz. That is, I’m going to subject your mind to tremendous onslaughts, and you cannot get up and leave because you’re caught. Not because I’m holding you prisoner, but because something in you will prevent you from leaving, while another part of you is going to go truthfully berserk. So brace yourself!”
There was something in me which was, I felt, a glutton for punishment. He was right. I wouldn’t have left the house for the world. And yet I didn’t like one bit the inanities he was spouting.
“I want to appeal to your analytical mind,” don Juan said. “Think for a moment, and tell me how you would explain the contradiction between the intelligence of man the engineer and the stupidity of his systems of beliefs, or the stupidity of his contradictory behavior. Sorcerers believe that the predators have given us our systems of beliefs, our ideas of good and evil, our social mores. They are the ones who set up our hopes and expectations and dreams of success or failure. They have given us covetousness, greed, and cowardice. It is the predators who make us complacent, routinary, and egomaniacal.”
“But how can they do this, don Juan?” I asked, somehow angered further by what he was saying. “Do they whisper all that in our ears while we are asleep?”
“No, they don’t do it that way. That’s idiotic!” don Juan said, smiling. “They are infinitely more efficient and organized than that. In order to keep us obedient and meek and weak, the predators engaged themselves in a stupendous maneuver – stupendous, of course, from the point of view of a fighting strategist. A horrendous maneuver from the point of view of those who suffer it. They gave us their mind. Do you hear me? The predators give us their mind, which becomes our mind. The predators’ mind is baroque, contradictory, morose, filled with the fear of being discovered any minute now.
“I know that even though you have never suffered hunger,” he went on, “you have food anxiety, which is none other than the anxiety of the predator who fears that any moment now its maneuver is going to be uncovered and food is going to be denied. Through the mind, which, after all, is their mind, the predators inject into the lives of human beings whatever is convenient for them. And they ensure, in this manner, a degree of security to act as a buffer against their fear.”
“It’s not that I can’t accept all this at face value, don Juan,” I said. “I could, but there’s something so odious about it that it actually repels me. It forces me to take a contradictory stand. If it’s true that they eat us, how do they do it?”
Don Juan had a broad smile on his face. He was as pleased as punch. He explained that sorcerers see infant human beings as strange, luminous balls of energy, covered from the top to the bottom with a glowing coat, something like a plastic cover that is adjusted tightly over their cocoon of energy. He said that that glowing coat of awareness was what the predators consumed, and that when a human being reached adulthood, all that was left of that glowing coat of awareness was a narrow fringe that went from the ground to the top of the toes. That fringe permitted mankind to continue living, but only barely.
As if I had been in a dream, I heard don Juan Matus explaining that to his knowledge, man was the only species that had the glowing coat of awareness outside that luminous cocoon. Therefore, he became easy prey for an awareness of a different order, such as the heavy awareness of the predator.
He then made the most damaging statement he had made so far. He said that this narrow fringe of awareness was the epicenter of self-reflection, where man was irremediably caught. By playing on our self-reflection, which is the only point of awareness left to us, the predators create flares of awareness that they proceed to consume in a ruthless, predatory fashion. They give us inane problems that force those flares of awareness to rise, and in this manner they keep us alive in order for them to be fed with the energetic flare of our pseudoconcerns.
There must have been something to what don Juan was saying, which was so devastating to me that at that point I actually got sick to my stomach.
After a moment’s pause, long enough for me to recover, I asked don Juan: “But why is it that the sorcerers of ancient Mexico and all sorcerers today, although they see the predators, don’t do anything about it?”
“There’s nothing that you and I can do about it,” don Juan said in a grave, sad voice. “All we can do is discipline ourselves to the point where they will not touch us. How can you ask your fellow men to go through those rigors of discipline? They’ll laugh and make fun of you, and the more aggressive ones will beat the shit out of you. And not so much because they don’t believe it. Down in the depths of every human being, there’s an ancestral, visceral knowledge about the predators’ existence.”
“Diverted” is certainly how one would describe the modern city dweller, and at an observational level, the maintenance of distraction, obfuscation, misinformation and confusion is readily apparent in the media on a daily basis. To keep our minds diverted, we are fed an endless stream of these “pseudoconcerns”, to distract us from the real concerns created by the same people, for whom the world is simply a source of resources to be plundered and recreated into the objects of their desires, and for which the bulk of humanity is merely the slave labour through whose efforts the parasites’ collective dreams are realised. If you should doubt that these things are true, consider that when Don Juan discusses “… the epicenter of self-reflection, where man was irremediably caught…”, he is referring to the inculcated and ingrained narcissism of the individual who has been given the predator’s mindset. The public figures we see in the media, especially in “showbusiness”, are without doubt utterly narcissistic. Think about that. When they say that something is wrong and they think that something should be done about it, are you, as the observer, being manipulated by a narcissist?
But to be specifically on-topic, and to begin to see how easily their control might be exercised, let me begin by stating that a practical magician (occult practitioner) is acknowledged, broadly, to be a person who affects the behaviour of others by putting a suggestion into their minds, to the extent that they find it difficult not to see things in the way intended by the magician. In other words, by programming the listener’s or viewer’s perceptions before the event, an alternative outcome is prevented, or an event is factually different from the magician’s intention but the percipient still sees it as it was intended to be seen. It was for this reason that after the recent Doctor Strange film (starring Benedict Cumberbatch) came out, some online commentators marvelled (so to speak) that less familiar viewers did not realise that about half of what they had seen was actually possible in real life, simply because it relied upon the practitioner’s mastery of suggestion and perception. Engineer the perception of your target, and you too can work magic, or at least maintain an illusion.
This implies that much of what we might call “magic” is not, in fact, necessarily a physical result of a previous action, but rather an act of perception, the outcome of which was predetermined by the practitioner; the percipient has been pre-programmed by careful and selective verbiage and direction of attention to see a particular outcome. This means that it is possible for nothing visible to actually “happen” because the “result” is entirely in the percipient’s head. Much advertising in the media needs to be seen in this light, as both it and outright displays of propaganda are frequently varieties of public programming, in which the public are slowly conditioned, by sheer repetition if need be, to expect something to happen, and to react in a certain way when it invariably does. This is called predictive programming.
Remember: “A lie repeated a thousand times becomes the truth.”
With regard to magical practice, what startled me, some time ago, was how I myself had failed to comprehend what was on a printed page right in front of me, and which related directly to all of this. Reading a copy of a compiled book version of the early editions of “Man, Myth and Magic” (given to me as a present by my grandmother, of all people – what was she thinking of???), one page referred to the Dictionnaire Infernel of the French mage, Collin de Plancy, a book in which – among other magical things – the author had included copies of sketches which he had drawn of demons summoned by himself during previous sessions in the circle. In this particular entry, I read that although de Plancy had drawn/painted the alleged appearances of the demons named in his text, they were not “real” in a physical sense – they were, instead, impressions implanted within the minds of the percipient (in this case, a practising ritual magician or similar occultist), such that a non-occultist standing in the circle right next to him/her would probably not be able to see them; an illusion projected directly into the magician’s mind such that two occultists in the same room would probably see the same demon differently. I actually did not realise the meaning of all this until very recently.
The demon, in this way of seeing it, was pure illusion, and this explains precisely why one demon (or similar entity) would be able to offer infinite visual versions of itself to an infinite number of percipients. This is also like saying that the definition of a physical object would likewise be different between individuals. Maybe that is an important statement. Alternatively: the “demon” was a real entity but its appearance was not real, as it existed only in the sorcerer’s mind and, at the end of the session, could be dismissed. [3]
Now we come to my main point. We have this thing called “civilisation” which is constantly lauded as a state to be emulated and maintained, but it seems to me that this is shaky ground. Why? Well, we should perhaps consider where the term “civilisation” comes from. It comes from the latin civis, meaning “city”. The corresponding modern English verb civilise, therefore, means what? According to WordNet [1], it means:
1. educate, school, train, cultivate, civilize, civilise — (teach or refine to be discriminative in taste or judgment; “Cultivate your musical taste”; “Train your tastebuds”; “She is well schooled in poetry”);
2. civilize, civilise — (raise from a barbaric to a civilized state; “The wild child found wandering in the forest was gradually civilized”).
It is interesting that these descriptions refer to discrimination, training and schooling; no actual “definition” is given here. One would suggest, in fact, that the literal meaning of “civilise” is something like “citify”, meaning to condition people into a suitable mindset for living in a city. And we might ask ourselves why it should be considered necessary to do such a thing?
You see, in the mainstream paradigm’s interpretation of “history”, “civilisation” is supposed to be somehow undeniably superior to an allegedly “barbaric” state which existed beforehand. This is because there is some elitist intellectual arrogance according to which notionally “uncivilised” people are supposed to be “inferior”, when in fact they are more capable of surviving in their chosen environments, and do not surround themselves with the useless frippery which “civilised” man thinks is so wonderful (be warned, however, that historically wherever there has been a minority power “elite”, there have always been a majority of “slaves” to do their bidding…).
In traditional Western thinking, this was expressed in terms of the “uncivilised” life being “nasty, brutish and short”, but generally speaking, people who lived in such a state, even into modern times, represented very little threat to civilisation; if anything, experience has shown that the opposite is true – “civilisation” in the Western model has proven horrendously destructive towards those whom it considers “uncivilised”, whereas the supposedly primitive “savage” was a person more closely in tune with their environment, and therefore more self-sufficient (being better able to find their requisites within that environment) and materially independent. What has really happened is that, having set itself up as a paragon of its own paradigm of a civilised state, the Western mindset has used the “uncivilised” periphery as a threat with which it, in turn, threatens its own citizens with a dire warning of what state they might descend into if they do not give the body politic the authority and resources to defend itself (and therefore, by implication, the citizens over whom it exercises its dubious “authority”). The nominally “uncivilised”, therefore, have usually ended up as the victims of the better-armed “civilised” nations. You couldn’t possibly observe a clearer and starker example of iniquity. Yet we call it civilisation.
Let us also ask ourselves what happens when the body politic’s identified “enemy” already happens to be, er, civilised. What normally happens is that they then try to dehumanise their notional “opponent”, the better to justify irrational (but highly profitable) warfare against them, which also has the helpful (from the elite’s point of view) characteristic of reducing the population of underlings… Our problem here is that the West has been self-regarding and narcissistic, and when their opponents are of a similar level of “civilisation”, ad hominem attacks (which is really what their irrational rationalisation of their intended or practical assaults are) is all that they have left. And as they are often unable to prove directly that what they assert is true, they are not above falsifying evidence and controlling its presentation at home to justify their destructive activity abroad.
We should also be asking ourselves what this actually means for the individual “citizen”, as all of this cannot possibly have happened without some obvious reason. To put it into an appropriate context, let us return to our supposed “primitive” and “uncivilised” person. Remember that we suggested that such a person must be more in tune with, and therefore self-sufficient in, their native environment, whether it be the forests of Africa or South America, the jungles of Borneo or even the coastline of sub-Arctic North America. People who lived in these places traditionally were able to feed and clothe themselves and do a range of other life-related activities without huge inputs of technology, but the essential point I would suggest here is that the logistic chain through which raw materials came to them was extremely short; they did not need expensive stores to offer them processed pseudo-foods, for example, because they knew from experience where to find what they needed to make things themselves. Likewise, they would have a way to clothe and house themselves and did not have to buy the raw materials for building their dwellings, because they could just walk out and get it for themselves, for free.
There is no mystery about this; what we have termed “civilisation” is simply the entrainment and coercion of people to travel from the countryside, where they were more or less self-sufficient, to the cities where they were dependent upon supply chains which were then used to siphon off the wealth that they were generating with their labour. The controllers (or their gofers) then also moved in (and, according to the experience of Mark Passio, are still moving in) to buy up the vacated land cheaply. The majority of the population, by this methodology, have slowly been deprived of their original resources and wealth. And with the added finance resulting from taxing their own “citizens”, the controllers then moved on to do the same to the inhabitants of other lands to increase their profits – empire – and the footsoldiers who achieved this were the same people from their own lands who had already been asset-stripped by their dubious leaders.
So we now see that what we describe as “civilisation” cannot be anything but a millennia-long confidence trick perpetrated upon the gullible by Passio’s “ancient psychologists”. The very people who were abused and coerced into becoming the hands of the power elites were the ones who created all of this, while the elites claimed all of the kudos and profit. Those who actually broke their backs putting it all together were the ones who were intentionally forgotten by the official histories because they were factual (or later, economic) slaves; a living could not be earned except by working for the elites in one form or another.
The greatest mistake that a modern “citizen” could possibly make, when repulsed by seeing the sequelae of this process, is to assume that there is a ready political cure for it. There is not. The rise of the Left since the time of the French Revolution has not led to any kind of Utopia – quite the contrary, since those people simply represent another narcissistic power clique who use the masses to whom they pay lip-service to achieve their own ends, and then show their utter contempt for them by abandoning them. Politicians are not there to serve the interests of the “citizens” – their function is to control the “citizenry” on behalf of their masters who exploit them. The obvious (and rather simplistic) dichotomy of “political thinking” is merely a dialectic imposed to split mass opinion and set people against each other. At best, any “revolution” has been merely a mask behind which authorities hide, and in which those who are ruled willingly enter into an increased servitude. The people you vote for represent only the interests of your rulers – everything they say is lies. The “facts” presented in the media are “facts” which are convenient to their narrative; the “education” you received suited their requirements in potential workers at the time, as well as constituting “propaganda” in their own right (because they were according to the dominant paradigm, and necessarily restricted in scope according to circumstances). Always think it possible that your “thoughts” are not original and your own, but were put there by someone else.
The first thing that anyone confronted by all of this needs to do is to learn to distance themselves from their emotions, since (as Passio explains) it is mainly by emotional dependencies and fear of a false unknown that the majority are usually manipulated. The second thing to be aware of is that in order to do this, they have to make people believe that there is some kind of a threat, be it a warlike enemy, or something in the environment, and then push this relentlessly, like a drug, until the public emotion has reached such a fever pitch that they are begging the leaders to provide a solution. In the modern context, the third thing to realise is that the controllers usually have some kinds of “provocateurs” to provide instantaneous stimulation to sweep people along – to lose themselves in their emotions and thus be more willing to react in the heat of the moment. It is for this final reason that we should always treat apparent “rebels” with suspicion, lest by losing ourselves while under their influence, we should simply be achieving the aims of the “leaders”. The very fact that any such person may be (a) in the media and (b) stridently criticising the status quo is a sure sign that they are provocateurs, and not genuine at all.
If this methodology seems somewhat far-fetched, it may be that you are suffering from a condition which came to be known as “Stockholm Syndrome” [2]. In other words, because of the apparent beneficence of your captors, it is difficult for you not to be sympathetic towards them when confronted with an alternative view both of them personally and their behaviour. But they are your captors: you live in a goldfish bowl, and they throw in some food for you every now and then. You are afraid of venturing beyond the goldfish bowl, because despite your restricted environment, it actually feels safe; and what you see through its walls is distorted and disturbing to your sight. You do not wish to remove the distortion for fear of the truth being even more disturbing; and so you stay in your goldfish bowl, accepting your situation; therfore, as we suggested at the beginning, your physical liberation is precluded by your refusal to first undergo a psychological liberation – to see that there is a different world out there and that you do not need your dependency. But the price of losing that dependency is the responsibility of making decisions in your own interest, something which the afflicted seem unwilling to do because they are so inured to being led by someone else, and to being in thrall of authority. It is only when we realise that the “authority” is flawed and factually toxic and destructive that people will realise that self-determination is not so bad, after all; better to die free and self-determining than as a helpless, mind-controlled slave. This is also what our aforementioned “neoteny” is all in aid of: the inculcated and conditioned maintenance of an immature psychology in the individual, the better to prevent them from making more informed decisions which might be detrimental to the Body Politic.
Again, quoting Carlos Castaneda at length, Don Juan provided an insight into what was required from the individual:
Don Juan kept on pushing his barb deeper and deeper into me. “The sorcerers of ancient Mexico,” he said, “saw; the predator. They called it the flyer because it leaps through the air. It is not a pretty sight. It is a big shadow, impenetrably dark, a black shadow that jumps through the air. Then, it lands flat on the ground. The sorcerers of ancient Mexico were quite ill at ease with the idea of when it made its appearance on Earth. They reasoned that man must have been a complete being at one point, with stupendous insights, feats of awareness that are mythological legends nowadays. And then everything seems to disappear, and we have now a sedated man.”
I wanted to get angry, call him a paranoiac, but somehow the righteousness that was usually just underneath the surface of my being wasn’t there. Something in me was beyond the point of asking myself my favorite question: What if all that he said is true? At the moment he was talking to me that night, in my heart of hearts, I felt that all of what he was saying was true, but at the same time, and with equal force, all that he was saying was absurdity itself.
“What are you saying, don Juan?” I asked feebly. My throat was constricted. I could hardly breathe.
“What I’m saying is that what we have against us is not a simple predator. It is very smart, and organized. It follows a methodical system to render us useless. Man, the magical being that he is destined to be, is no longer magical. He’s an average piece of meat. There are no more dreams for man but the dreams of an animal who is being raised to become a piece of meat: trite, conventional, imbecilic.”
Don Juan’s words were eliciting a strange, bodily reaction in me comparable to the sensation of nausea. It was as if I were going to get sick to my stomach again. But the nausea was coming from the bottom of my being, from the marrow of my bones. I convulsed involuntarily. Don Juan shook me by the shoulders forcefully. I felt my neck wobbling back and forth under the impact of his grip. The maneuver calmed me down at once. I felt more in control.
“This predator,” don Juan said, “which, of course, is an inorganic being, is not altogether invisible to us, as other inorganic beings are. I think as children we do see it and decide it’s so horrific that we don’t want to think about it. Children, of course, could insist on focusing on the sight, but everybody else around them dissuades them from doing so.
“The only alternative left for mankind,” he continued, “is discipline. Discipline is the only deterrent. But by discipline I don’t mean harsh routines. I don’t mean waking up every morning at five- thirty and throwing cold water on yourself until you’re blue. Sorcerers understand discipline as the capacity to face with serenity odds that are not included in our expectations. For them, discipline is an art: the art of facing infinity without flinching, not because they are strong and tough but because they are filled with awe.”
“In what way would the sorcerers’ discipline be a deterrent?” I asked.
“Sorcerers say that discipline makes the glowing coat of awareness unpalatable to the flyer,” don Juan said, scrutinizing my face as if to discover any signs of disbelief. “The result is that the predators become bewildered. An inedible glowing coat of awareness is not part of their cognition, I suppose. After being bewildered, they don’t have any recourse other than refraining from continuing their nefarious task.
“If the predators don’t eat our glowing coat of awareness for a while,” he went on, “it’ll keep on growing. Simplifying this matter to the extreme, I can say that sorcerers, by means of their discipline, push the predators away long enough to allow their glowing coat of awareness to grow beyond the level of the toes. Once it goes beyond the level of the toes, it grows back to its natural size.
“The sorcerers of ancient Mexico used to say that the glowing coat of awareness is like a tree. If it is not pruned, it grows to its natural size and volume. As awareness reaches levels higher than the toes, tremendous maneuvers of perception become a matter of course.
“The grand trick of those sorcerers of ancient times,” don Juan continued, “was to burden the flyers’ mind with discipline. They found out that if they taxed the flyers’ mind with inner silence, the foreign installation would flee, giving to any one of the practitioners involved in this maneuver the total certainty of the mind’s foreign origin. The foreign installation comes back, I assure you, but not as strong, and a process begins in which the fleeing of the ‘flyers’ mind becomes routine, until one day it flees permanently. A sad day indeed! That’s the day when you have to rely on your own devices, which are nearly zero. There’s no one to tell you what to do. There’s no mind of foreign origin to dictate the imbecilities you’re accustomed to.
“My teacher, the nagual Julian, used to warn all his disciples,” don Juan continued, “that this was the toughest day in a sorcerer’s life, for the real mind that belongs to us, the sum total of our experience, after a lifetime of domination has been rendered shy, insecure, and shifty. Personally, I would say that the real battle of sorcerers begins at that moment. The rest is merely preparation.”
If an individual is repulsed by the sight of what their controllers have created, the “discipline” spoken of here by Don Juan is the maintenance of the sensibility which allows us to see it, to keep our eyes focused and trained upon it, and to avoid the recidivistic habit which would otherwise cause us to forever revert to the former controlled state, because the inculcated desire to delegate important decisions to “authority figures” empowered by ourselves leads, in the end, only to destruction. [4] The real world that we want to see will never come to fruition until we insist upon self-determination and self-ownership, and exercise the self-discipline necessary to do both successfully.
These have been the concepts which have been foremost in mind since my cancer operation earlier this year. I was frightened at the idea of having a fatal medical condition, but more frightened at the prospect of death, so I voluntarily surrendered to a procedure in the first major surgery of my life, and the result was that said life has been prolonged; nobody knows for how much longer, but we are all mortal and can only prolong our lives by making the correct decisions. At the same time, however, the realisation that nobody gets out alive has turned out to be motivating: this is MY life, I make all the decisions and I accept responsibility for those decisions. I have always disliked the ways in which some people have tried to involve themselves in my life and influence my decisions, and now I have a zero-tolerance attitude towards such interference. If people don’t like it, tough. I will make no apologies for my self-assertion. And what has emerged from this is greater self-discipline (somewhat more than previously, at any rate) and overall determination about the things I want to do and how I want to spend my life.
Bottom line: this is my personal existence. It does not belong to any government or to anyone else, but to me alone. I will determine for myself what I will eat and drink, what thoughts I will keep in my head, how I support myself and my own ultimate fate. I will not delegate these to anyone else and I will maintain the discipline until the time comes to submit to mortality. Which, I hope, is a long way yet to come… and if that means being “uncivilised”, then so be it. If history has any lessons to learn, it is that in the end, all “civilisations” have proven to be as mortal as any of their citizens.
[1] https://wordnet.princeton.edu
[2] https://www.history.com/news/stockholm-syndrome
[3] See “The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin the Mage” (translated by Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers) for how an ancient practitioner might have done this. A version is available online at http://www.hermetism.info/pdf/Grimoire/The%20Sacred%20Magic%20of%20Abramelin%20the%20Mage.pdf.
[4] See: https://www.activistpost.com/2018/04/how-the-globalism-con-game-leads-to-a-new-world-order.html for some more enlightenment, so to speak, on this topic.
Entr’acte II
Posted by Andrew | Filed under A Farewell to Authority, Breakfast in the Ruins, Cancer Diary, Commentary, General, Living in Korea, The Destruction of History
As things have been rather quiet with Yours Truly of late, a brief blog to bring everyone up to speed…
As a freezing cold winter slouches kicking and screaming into spring, and factually some of us are not getting any younger, we are also waiting – still – to sign our new contract and move on. How so? Well, I have (so to speak) “been here before” – caught up in the time-consuming activity of background checking for the new position, which is associated with the military. Again. And this time I think it is worth the prolonged agony, based upon what is a quite extensive experience of different employers.
See, in recent years, I’ve been through an alarming number of institutions, and the original motivation for chasing them for jobs was that I always thought they were professional entities, but the experience I have had with them (as a vulnerable E-2 visa holder) has been stressful; no wonder my hair has dropped out! And this whole thing has been very… disillusioning, as if the depth of diabolical despondency I had sunk into before I even left the UK was not enough. It has become very apparent to me that (in this particular instance) I was severely misguided in my assumption of “professionalism” in these companies, and so, now that the opportunity has arrived, I have had to reassess my opinions and ask what kind of employer is most suitable, and the answer is simple: the ones who will, for reasons relating primarily to their relationship with the Korean government, always honour their contracts.
Now, don’t get me wrong: the situation remains one in which I am surprised to discover that even at the tender age of 55 (in other words, I will be 56 this year), there are still institutions which will throw new opportunities at me: even the fact that I have been treated for (and technically am still “recovering from”) cancer has – it seems – not dented their enthusiasm. And this time, the essential “difference” is that my students will be exclusively high schoolers, which is something of a departure from my norm. However, the greatest surprise is the apparent eagerness, on the new employer’s part, to get me in there no matter what; so I temper my natural anxiety at being perilously close to the end of a visa with an element of patience and expectation – in anticipation of a positive and, one would hope, a mutually beneficial relationship to come. And I hope it lasts for a suitably substantial length of time. I’m talking years, dude!
It’s not clear yet how this will pan out because of the fiendish length of time I am having to hang on, right now, waiting for the (already apparently positive) result of the new employer’s two-stage security clearance checks before actually putting pen to contract, as my current visa is slowly edging towards expiry; also, surprisingly, the lack of actual details of the post itself, as the “interview” turned out to be something of a damp squib (apparently I was expected to do some kind of demo, but the recruiter didn’t pass that on to me, among other things, quel surprise). But, previously, I have worked for the Royal Air Force back in the UK and have done instructing for another military employer here in Korea, the KDLI in Icheon, Gyeonggi-do, so it’s not like there will be a huge surprise, in terms of practice and procedure (and security implications, of course). Right now, it’s just a case of being patient and getting in there ASAP.
But an interesting theme seems to be emerging while I am waiting… it’s been a long, long time since I had the dubious pleasure of a TV in my apartment, and truth to tell, when you consider that a lot of the time, I only want to watch older stuff (with exceptions such as trying out the latest Star Trek and X Files), and the amount available for free, on-line and on demand, from the likes of YouTube, DailyMotion and – right now – 123MoviesHub.ag [3], means that a TV is basically unnecessary; everything is digital and available for free through my Internet cable. This doesn’t mean that TV is actually redundant (UFC, anyone???), but the dominance that it had over my mind when I was younger is shattered forever. I made a choice, and the result is that my mind is much freer. I need hardly point out that as this is Korea, much of what I might have to subscribe to here would also be rather irrelevant in cultural and linguistic terms.
All of which means that I have become progressively more open to information and opinions which formerly I would have considered ridiculous, unjustified and downright way out, which subsequent events have demonstrated to my satisfaction are possibly more deserving of consideration and merit than social (and media) conditioning would previously allow me to countenance. And yet, at the same time, I do think that since I was a teenager, I have been on a path away from notional orthodoxy, be it in terms of historical truth or scientific honesty, for example, in search of a kind of verisimilitude which cannot be tolerated by a control system the machinations of which depend upon the demonstrable covert destruction of important historical materials, the perversion of historical events and the erection of whole paradigms which work only as a result of indoctrination and saturated media propaganda (Bill Nye, anyone? Neil DeGrasse Tyson??? Who will the next buffoon be?) which seems to be resulting, especially in the USA, in a new caste of younger people who are emotionally unstable when their knowledge or opinions are questioned. This latter is the very opposite of learning and wisdom, and it is very revealing that, being unable to mount a rational and complicated argument against even just a person with a different opinion, the response tends to be a kind of emotional violence akin to that of a two-year-old. A recent example from Sputnik:
Professor Says Men and Women are Different
At a personal level, I am repulsed by this kind of thing, and it has been stimulating me to look more towards traditional philosophers; it does seem to me that inculcated infantilism is not a suitable response to the dangers which are arising in modern societies – and if you look at places like the Ukraine right now, it’s not “new” dangers that are arising: instead, it’s the return of the “old” dangers, rooted in the previous centuries but especially the events and attitudes of the mid-twentieth century. There is a word for this, and that word is recidivism – meaning a return to a former, inferior and usually criminal or otherwise socially unacceptable mode of behaviour [1]. Experience shows us that it is usually not a good idea to try to return to the environment of our past, primarily because we have changed – the increase in our knowledge and experience, not to mention the resulting changes in our personal sensibilities which also change the limits of what we will now tolerate, is what really makes a return to a past situation impossible. It is for this reason that we will often hear that the transition from an old paradigm to a new one is referred to as “being like dying”, as we shed the old attachments, possibly with great psychological difficulty, in order to accommodate the new – which seems somehow reminiscent of the comment by Max Planck: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” [4] – except here, of course, it is the concept which dies rather than the adherent.
As an example of the type of new input that I have been accepting, take a look at “Redesigning Reality”, a relatively new vodcast put out regularly by Dylan Charles of “Waking Times” [2] fame, assisted by his friend, Jeff Anthony, whose response to his own bodily injuries has been very philosophical and mature and has impressed me greatly:
http://redesigningreality.com
and you can see them regularly on YouTube:
plus, perhaps, honourable mentions for the likes of Vin Armani and his show… but alas, I do not tune in to Vin as often as I should.
However, we have to face all of these (and other) potential inputs with a severe caveat: none of them is one hundred per cent. reliable.
One would think that this was the prime result of enlightened exposure to conventional media – the realisation that there is a limit to how much credence we can extend to them. So, for example, recently Vin had David Icke as a guest on his show:
David represents an interesting example of information and opinion input, largely because of his long-time claim regarding the manipulation of humanity by unseen reptilian beings, for which he has frequently been lambasted by the mainstream media. But here’s the interesting point: take this away (or ignore it temporarily) and focus on the rest of his message, and what do you discover? It all connects well, and makes a disconcerting amount of sense, as well, perhaps, as being a lot more humane than the conventional narratives. Notice here how well it seems to interdigitate with Vin’s personal take on the situation. Subtract the one part of David’s narrative which is difficult to prove, and the result is a coherent picture; there is nothing which David expresses which should attract disrespect from the listener.
This is teaching us something: no source of information is absolutely reliable and foolproof, so approaching verisimilitude means having the bullshit detector on and weaving our way through a constant morass of misinformation and disinformation to uncover reality (note that I do not say “the truth” here). I would not accuse David of disseminating such materials – rather, the interesting point is that when his most contentious (and difficult-to-prove) topic is placed to one side, the rest makes striking sense. We should do this until it can either be definitively proven or disproven.
The implication here is that there are truthful elements within all narratives, but according to the reliability, affiliations and provenance of the originators of those narratives, each needs to be assessed on his/her/its own merits and compared with other narratives to arrive at a more realistic assessment of what we are seeing and hearing. To what extent are any of these truthful? How do they corroborate or deny each others’ veracity? Sometimes we need to return to these fundamental points, especially when we realise the extent to which such institutions as schools and universities are really just indoctrination houses for a particular paradigm. This point should be foremost in our minds at all times; we cannot judge the truthfulness or falsehood of what confronts us otherwise. When we hear the sayings of others, when we watch a documentary or read a book or a newspaper article (online or offline), what we are confronted with is either an opinion (which may or may not be reliable or truthful, depending upon previous inputs of information to the speaker) or a concoction of facts and non-facts intended to bolster support for a particular agenda – which I once saw in an old cartoon expressed as (and here I paraphrase): “a subtle blend of truth, half-truth and anything but the truth.”
To put it another way: On the spectrum from zero to one hundred per cent. “truthfulness”, where would you routinely place what you hear in the news? This is always a simple and convenient way of measuring things, and I often use this kind of scale for other purposes with my students:
On this scale, I would put David Icke at about 85%.
The final element here relates to my recent brush with death in the form of colorectal cancer, something I had not expected, but having said that, something for which I was mightily glad to find an accommodating surgeon; and the fact that post-operative recovery seems to have been so rapid (due to the experimental device used) cannot allow me to ignore the implications for the future. But one side-effect I have discovered, at the psychological level, is a loss of patience. By this I mean to suggest that the sudden unexpected encounter with mortality, having made me realise that my days are ultimately numbered, has stripped away my usual forbearance with certain social behaviours, and the constant attempt by certain sources to indoctrinate me into the obviously false paradigm is one of these; another is the visible recidivism in both myself and others, which will result in stagnation if allowed to proceed unchecked; essentially, I have lost my tolerance for distractions, and feel as if I want to apply Occam’s Razor to everything, the better to avoid constantly wasting precious time.
So from my current perspective, the arrival of my new employer has to be seen in terms of how it will enable me to develop and progress, as it is not like previous positions – what promise does it hold in its own right, and what might it eventually lead to, bearing in mind that I have never subscribed to (what seems to me to be) a rather antiquated view of “retirement” – excuse me? If I arrive at an age at which employers no longer wish to take me on, does my life suddenly end? Does my brain suddenly stop functioning? Of course not – this is really nineteenth-century thinking, a leftover from a time when employees of such institutions as the British railways could have the luxury of working for a single, reliable employer for their whole lives and then stop working. But my mind is too active for that. So we now arrive at a time of transition.
Last night (a Saturday night spent at home – again – because of the post-operative strictures imposed by the surgeon) I was looking at the philosophy of Epicurus, noting how it seems to fit quite well with my own outlook on pleasure and pain and (believe it or not) the avoidance of unnecessary acquisition of material satisfactions, and today, whilst thinking about this, noting afresh (and not without some surprise) how the basics of life could have changed so little since the man himself was alive. It is in this frame of mind that I will be facing the future – avoiding unnecessary discomfort (I would not use the word “suffering”, as this is illogical) by choosing carefully the things I wish to have in my life, and bearing in mind that what the likes of advertisers and other contemptible mind-controllers want me to waste my time on are not necessary for the essential core of my lifestyle. I am not someone’s convenient target market, I am a rational human being and will resist the tide of greed and idiocy in search of a reliable picture of reality.
So I come closer to the time of signing and remain here for a short while longer, throwing out trash and planning the transition, but it’s probably a good idea to remember that the avoidance of recidivism usually involves throwing out some of your own junk. That, I think, is a good point to end here: letting go of my junk and opening my mind to new vistas of knowledge and thought. Epicurus, at least, got that part right.
References:
[1] See also the definition given at http://www.dictionary.com/browse/recidivism?s=t.
[2] See: http://www.wakingtimes.com
[3] See, for example: https://123movieshub.ag/series/star-trek-discovery/
[4] See: https://www.brainyquote.com/search_results?q=max+planck
